Tim not nice and very Dim

[SpontaneousOrder]

Rosetta probe one was fine. People need to grow up about that. He was not anti women.

But Tim Hunt is. Pleased he left. People like Nigel Short and him are dinosaurs.

All Nigel did was assert that men & women's brains, generally speaking, work differently. This is almost universally accepted.

Then he asserted that that difference gave men, generally speaking, greater chess potential. This is not universally accepted and up or debate / study.

Seems a bit harsh to label him a dinosaur for using his own anecdotal experience, as far as we know, to suggest that women are generally predisposed to have less chess-playing potential, while it's perfectly fine to suggest that women are generally better at multi-tasking.

It's intuitively reasonable to expect (and pretty much also universally accepted) that - generally speaking - being good at certain things often means one is less competent at other unrelated things.

[unixman]

All Nigel did was assert that men & women's brains, generally speaking, work differently. This is almost universally accepted.

Then he asserted that that difference gave men, generally speaking, greater chess potential. This is not universally accepted and up or debate / study.

Whether he was correct/incorrect isn't quite the point. It is okay to make silly, informal remarks, even in public. Most people do it all the time. Scientists (and artists) do it because they have open minds and are used to working with intelligent, open minded people. But here they have come up against oafish, closed and backward minds. The sort of minds who see a Nobel prize winner and hope he will make an off hand remark so they can burn his career at the stake. The sort of minds who would see cancer go unresearched, space left uninvestigated, students left unlectured, so long as they can play their little power game and get their own way.

The ones who should be sacked are those who have seen this attack on education and not stood up to it. UCL has displayed cowardice, cowardice in the face of the enemy. Give them some help:-

https://www.change.org/p/university-...state-tim-hunt

[SpontaneousOrder]

But here they have come up against oafish, closed and backward minds.

Well with regards to Short, this is precisely the sentiment that I was suggesting should be qualified in some way?

I don't know the guy - so it could be true.

I.e. why does suggesting that men are, on the whole, genetically predisposed to be better chess players than women, make someone oafish, closed and backward?

Do you know of evidence to show otherwise? Or reason to doubt Short's experience or the method in which he draws conclusions from that experience?

If not then it must be the accuser that is "oafish, closed and backward", surely?



I'm not saying that his method of forming his conclusions aren't flawed - I don't know and I don't care enough to find out.

But that newspaper article is filled top to bottom with people saying 'but a [particular] woman keeps beating him' - which is about as dense a response as I've ever heard, and general smears for daring to sugest such a thing - as if it's even an important thing to get wound up about in the first place.

What's wrong with saying something like "I think his sample size is too small to draw any meaningful conclusions", if one thinks that's the case, " and therefore I think he's either dumb, or just doesn't care because he's sexist".

Without knowing the guy it's hard to say one is more likely to be true than the other (to the degree that the two are different to begin with).


If someone should deserve slander then I'd much prefer it to be the result of rational judgement, than politically correct and fashionable outrage :s One is meaningful, and the other is not - even if it otherwise would be deserved.

[SueEllen]

Women aren't actually better at multi-tasking there are studies that prove this.

Lots of things we presume about the different sexes characteristics aren't biological but cultural.

They have done experiments where they have told adults that a baby is a boy or a girl, and the language adults use and how they play with the baby changes on whether it is a boy or girl regardless of the age of the baby. So these cultural stereotypes are impressed on kids from the moment they are born.

Unfortunately when they try to do experiments with monkeys the studies have also followed the same pattern e.g. gender stereotypes come into play due to how the experiment is set up.

In regards to Tim Hunt, by getting into the media with his comments he brought UCL into disrepute. So he's a dinosaur in more than one way if he hasn't realised things that maybe OK to say in the UK as a joke isn't fine to say in other cultures, mobile phones are everywhere, as a Nobel prize winner what he says will be reported via social media instantly and these reports will be picked up by the media worldwide.

[SpontaneousOrder]

Women aren't actually better at multi-tasking there are studies that prove this.

Lots of things we presume about the different sexes characteristics aren't biological but cultural.

They have done experiments where they have told adults that a baby is a boy or a girl, and the language adults use and how they play with the baby changes on whether it is a boy or girl regardless of the age of the baby. So these cultural stereotypes are impressed on kids from the moment they are born.

Unfortunately when they try to do experiments with monkeys the studies have also followed the same pattern e.g. gender stereotypes come into play due to how the experiment is set up.

In regards to Tim Hunt, by getting into the media with his comments he brought UCL into disrepute. So he's a dinosaur in more than one way if he hasn't realised things that maybe OK to say in the UK as a joke isn't fine to say in other cultures, mobile phones are everywhere, as a Nobel prize winner what he says will be reported via social media instantly and these reports will be picked up by the media worldwide.

And even if jokes are ok in a particular situation, they can still be in poor taste. If your joke isn't crafted deliberately to provoke a particular response, then there's often truth (as in opinion) to be read between the lines.